Block84.com - Lifestyle is a terrible thing to waste.

As most of you know Grand Theft Auto came out last week to much fanfare. The hype around this game was crazy and it could very well be the best selling video game of all time. The numbers in the UK have been released and according to MCV - http://www.mcvuk.com/news/30423/GTA-IV-smashes-one-day-sales-record -  sales for the game hit 609,000 in one day. This number smashes the 501,000 of San Andreas and completely destroys the 266,000 of Halo 3.

These numbers are unbelievable, and owning and playing the game myself, I can see why. With all the good surrounding this game, the bad is getting lost in the shuffle. And the bad is bad. Yahoo! News gives us the following:

Dozens of disappointed GTA IV players have reported that their gaming consoles have frozen at various points in the game. Most of the reports are from PlayStation 3 owners, but some Xbox 360 units have also been affected.

“GTA4Freezes all the time., Heeeeelp” is the morose heading of the largest forum thread, with more than 45 separate messages and more than 6,000 views. The thread was started by an Australian gamer on Monday and offers a typical complaint: “I got GTA on Sunday and it freezes and I have to restart the console it happens every hour or so, I thought it may be a dodgy disc, so I took the disc back to the shop and got a new one and almost 40 mins into the game and it froze on me again.”

You can read the whole article here: http://news.yahoo.com/s/nf/20080430/bs_nf/59531

Freezing is not the biggest issue. The people at Rockstar North can’t figure out what the problem is. Apparently the problem is erratic and has no pattern. The majority of the issue has taken place with the 60GB PS3 while a few 20GB PS3’s and Xbox 360’s have also frozen.

If you head over to http://www.youtube.com/user/FIXGTA4NOW you will see a page dedicated to this issue. Not only are there many videos of the game freezing up on people, but it also has links to some news articles and forums on this issue.

Now, all this is bad, but there is more. First off, Take Two, the parent company of Rockstar Games, publicly rejected a purchase offer from Electronic Arts citing the offered price per share was too low. With the expectation of a boom in sales due to GTA IV, which happened, they felt they could hold out for more money. This problem, however, might change that outlook.

Now on to the WORST part of this whole thing. GTA IV is actually causing entire systems to crash. This again is mainly on the PS3 console, but is happening on XBOX as well. Check out this video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eHUKXmUwBVk&feature=related. When the game freezes on some people, the game console itself will no longer load any games! Rockstar looks like they have a massive issue on their hands.